The Chronology of Water (10 page)

 

Before my father was an architect he was a navigator in the Korean War
.

I can only go to black and white photos here. When I hold them in my hand I suddenly have to face the fact of real war, and his body in it. The photos have barracks and rifles and uniforms. The photos have jeeps and helicopters and the landscape of the military. The photos are of my father with men I never met nor ever will, men who may be dead by now, men who went to war before I was born, before Vietnam.

There are two kinds of photos. In the first kind each frame is filled with an extraordinary architecture - Korean Buddhist temples and shrines.

The second kind carry men. There is a black man who reappears in several of the photos. When I hold the photos, my father isn’t the abusive fuck. He becomes a different story, the one he and my mother and uncle and aunt told and retold about the lengths he went to concerning his best friend - a black man whose name I will never know. I can’t remember it. I was a child when these stories were told.

But the stories are all about how my dad would sit out in the car with this guy when the other guys would go out to eat or drink or dance when they were on leave. How he’d go in and get food or beer and bring it out to the car or the curb or some vacant lot near whatever establishment and they’d sit and share it together.

I look at the black man in the photo. I wish I could talk to him. Ask him questions about my father then. Was he funny? Was he kind? Did he ever make a drawing for you? What things
scared him, or hurt him, or made him happy? What was my father like during wartime? What is a man?

My father was handsome.

 

Sometimes, when we were alone, I would ask my mother questions about my father when they first met. She would nearly always go into the spare bedroom, pull a shoebox down from the closet, sit down next to me, and unfold a piece of drawing paper. On the paper was a redbird. A beautifully drawn - I mean artistically stunning redbird. She would smile, and keep her eyes down, and say in her soft southern drawl almost in the voice of a girl, “Your father won an art prize for this drawing.” In the same box, she would unfold a yellowed scatter of pages filled with beautiful handwriting. “I won a prize for this story.”

And then she would carefully fold it all back up, put it back in the box, return it to the closet.

When I hold photos of the two of them in my hands my heart aches. My father looking all James Dean with his rolled at the cuff denims and his white muscle tee with cigarettes tucked in the sleeve and his mirror sunglasses. My mother in her 50s dresses with wide skirts and her hair tied back, her lips that were red as a coca-cola can looking black in the black and white photos. They were gorgeous. Hollywood. She was smiling. He looked like someone a woman would fall in love with.

There is another photo of him sitting at a picnic table. He has khaki pants on and a white shirt. The way he is sitting? His crossed legs and bad posture and long fingers running through his thick hair? His other hand wrapped around his neck so that his elbow folds softly in? He has the body language of an artist. I know. I married three in a row.

 

I know how to tell this story. I know how to story over things.

His senior year. Bases loaded at a catholic school. Cleveland, Ohio, the gray of pavement and winter sealing fates. Nuns and Fathers in black, black coats and boots and hats on the bodies of family members. The boys on the field as beautiful as boys on a field are; strange angels. Breath making fog from mouths. Eyes keened in on plays and moves and the edge of things. Top of the ninth. The board wearing its scores, though no one needs to look. At the moment sweat is forming at his upper lip, and just as his arms uncoil to connect thick whack and send the little world out of the park, at that moment all the nuns and all the fathers look up, like faith. Right then the end of things rings in the boy like hope. He sees college. He sees leaving home. He sees a chance at inhabiting the word athlete. His arms surrender. His body shivers. A cheer rises up like a chorus. Everyone is a single voice. Except one. At that moment a man leaves. His back stopping the action.

The home run. The father gone. The boy turning into man - he must have looked … beautiful.

That’s it.

That’s as far as I can go.

To go further into his story, it takes the air right out of my lungs as if I’d been swimming all night.

I do know his tongue was cut. When I look at my son and think of that I think I could kill a woman who would cut a boy’s tongue.

Before my father was my father he was a boy.

Just a boy.

Before I hated him I loved him.

WHEN I WAS 10 TO CHEER ME UP FROM MY DESPAIR OF my sister’s leaving, my father brought home a hot pink Schwinn with a banana seat and streamers coming out of the handlebars. I saw him pull it out of the trunk of the station wagon. I saw him wheel it up to the front porch. I saw him kick the kickstand and let her rest. The window a membrane between us.

I thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen - except for my green metal toy army jeep. Still. Its hot pink glory. Its streamers like hair. That big white banana seat. I gasped.

The thing was, however, I did not know how to ride a bike. Like at all. Scared of most things that required me to “do” something besides swim, I’d even forsaken trikes, their threewheeling menace not something I’d ever mastered. With trikes I’d flat foot the thing along, my failure disgusting my father enough to hide it away in the garage. So when I came outside to touch the hot pink ride, beautiful as she was, all I felt was terror. When my father said, “It’s time to learn to ride a bike,” my legs shook and my throat hurt.

He meant right then. He meant for me to get on and try right that second.

My mother stood in the doorway saying “Mike, she doesn’t know howah” in her southern drawl, but my father meant business.

“C’mon,” he said, and wheeled the bike around to face the street.

I felt the immediate sting of tears but followed anyway. Between terror and drawing his rage, I chose terror.

My father kicked up the kickstand and held the handlebars and told me to get on. I did. He pushed us forward slowly and told me to put my feet on the pedals. But the pedals seemed like giant befuddlements to me, and they were going around in a way I couldn’t understand, so my feet sort of interrupted them now and again like human clubs.

“Goddamn it, I said put your feet on the pedals.”

Fear gripped my little chest, but fear of his anger again won. I put my feet on the pedals and tried to follow them round and round, looking straight down.

Still holding the handlebars, and walking us forward, my father said, “Now look up and put your hands on the handle - bars. I put my hands near his - they looked like a doll’s hands next to the meat of a father’s. “I said look up, goddamn it, if you don’t look where you are going you are going to crash.”

Training wheels. Weren’t there such a thing? Hadn’t I seen them?

I put my hands on the handlebars. I looked up. My feet felt retarded - like heavy rocks going up and down. Then he let go of the handlebars and held on to the back of the bike. Briefly I wobbled and let go and tipped over. I fell knee first downward but he grabbed me by my shirt and lifted me upward. “Don’t cry, for christ’s sake,” he said. “You better not cry.”

Not crying, I could barely breathe.

We went through this routine up and down the street until the sun lowered. I remember thanking god for lowering the sun. Soon it would be dark, it would be dinner time, my mother would put plates out. I knew how to eat dinner.

But that was not what my father wanted.

On a pass close to the house, he turned me around and said, “Now we’ll try the hill.”

The hill was up the block from our cul-de-sac. I don’t have any idea what the true grade was - but in the car coming home from swim practice my mother used the brakes. At the top of the hill was my beloved vacant lot. At the bottom was the right turn you had to make to get to our house.

My father had to push me up the hill. “Would you please pedal? For christ’s sake.”

When I say I thought I might vomit, I want to you understand. The vomit I was pretty sure I was about to spew felt like if it happened, my entire body would simply go inside out. That I’d puke so hard I’d puke my self. To this day I don’t know why I wasn’t crying at that point. I was silent. Just the breath of a girl pedaling up a hill.

At the top of the hill he turned me around on my beautiful bike and held the back of the seat. I remember shaking and staring down what looked pretty much like that moment on a roller coaster before the dive.

He said, “You back pedal to break it - little by little - as you pickup speed.”

He said, “Down at the bottom you break enough to make a turn, and you turn. Left.”

Incomprehensibly few words to me a girl.

Then I did the unthinkable. “Daddy, I can’t do it.”

My bottom lip kid quivering.

“You sure as hell can,” he said, and pushed.

Psychedelic drugs put you in realms where language fails to describe emotion. I know this as an adult. What you think, what you feel, what happens to your body - your head, your arms and legs, your hands - goes into an alien dream. Your body disembodies. Your mind folds inward to the undiscovered geography of the brain. That’s the best way I can describe the shape I was in when he pushed me down that hill. The endorphins of my terror induced an altered state.

At first I gripped the handlebars so hard my palms stung. I screamed all the way down. I backpedaled but it didn’t seem
to me like anything was slowing down. The possibility of stopping seemed like a lie. The possibility of turning right seemed like trying to ride to China.

Wind on my face my palms sting my knees hurt pressing backwards speed and speedspeedspeedspeed holding my breath and my skin tingling like it does up in trees terrible spiders crawling my skin like up high at the grand canyon my head too hot turnturnturnturnturn I am turning I am braking I can’t feel my feet I can’t feel my legs I can’t feel my arms I can’t feel my hands my head my heart my father’s voice yelling good girl my father running down the hill my father who did this who pushed me my eyes closing my limbs going limp my letting go me letting go so sleepy so light floating floating objects speed eyes closed violent hitting objects crashing nothing.

I came to in my father’s arms - he carried me into our house. I heard the worry in my mother’s voice saying “Mike? Mike?” He carried me into my bedroom. She followed. He yelled “Get a flashlight.” She yelled “What for? What’s wrong?” He yelled “Get it goddamn it. I think she’s hurt down there.” She did. He laid me down on my princess canopy bed. I looked at the white lace. My hands between my legs. My mother returned with the flashlight. My father pulled my hands away and then pulled my pants down. My mother said “Mike?” I began to cry. Hurt where pee lives. My father pulled down my underwear. My mother said “Mike.” My father spread my legs and turned on the flashlight and said, “She’s bleeding.” My mother crying my father saying “Dorothy go outside you are hysterical,” my mother leaving. My father saying close the door goddamn it.

Weren’t there things called doctors? Hospitals?

I’d crashed my bike into a row of mailboxes.

I’d ruptured my hymen.

My father’s hands.

A flashlight.

Blood.

Girl.

The next day he made me get back on the bike after work. He made me go back to the top of the hill. It hurt so bad to sit on the bike I bit the inside of my cheek. But I did not cry. He said, “You have to get right back on and conquer your fear. You have to.” Again he pushed me. Little girl not old enough to know her anger her fear her body sailing down the hill on her hot pink Schwinn, streamers flying.

Between terror and rage I chose rage.

Partway down the hill I thought of my father and how I hated the way his skin smelled like ash skin yellow cigarette stains on his fingers and his big architectural hands and his pushing me and I closed my eyes… I closed them, I did, I let go of the handlebars and I put my hands out to the sides of my body. I felt the wind on my palms and fingers. On my face. My chest. Maybe blowing straight through my heart. I stopped breaking. My feet weightless.

I wiped out without making any turns toward our house. Though no bones were broken, I was scraped all over. My face. My elbows and arms. My knees and legs. My strong swimmer boy shoulders. All I was was my body. Bleeding. Bleeding.

But not crying.

For years and years, after that.

Bennett Huffman

Jeff Forester

Robert Blucher

Ben Bochner

James Finley

Lynn Jeffress

Neil Lidstrom

Hal Powers

Jane Sather

Charles Varani

Meredith Wadley

Ken Zimmerman

Lidia

Twelve last ditch disciples and me.

How I walked through the door of the 1988-89 collaborative novel writing workshop with Ken Kesey was that my writer friend Meredith Wadley grabbed my hand and marched me into the class without anyone’s permission. Meredith seemed to me like a cross between a gorgeous and complex Faulkner character with only the faintest hint of a southern drawl, and a wealthy English equestrian champion. Meredith had a mane of dark hair and even darker eyes. In her eyes there were electrical sparks. On the day the “class” was to begin we were drinking beers in her apartment. I admit it. I was jealous. Almost choke on beer jealous. When it came time for her to go to the class, she
said, “Enough crappy things have happened to you. Come with me.”